The rapidly growing market for portable electronic devices, e.g. cellular phones, laptop computers, and tablet computers, is an integral facet of modern life. The multitude of portable devices represents one of the largest potential market opportunities for next generation manufacturing. These devices have unique attributes that have significant impacts on manufacturing integration, in that they must be generally small, lightweight, and rich in functionality and they must be produced in high volumes at relatively low cost.
As an extension of the semiconductor industry, the electronics manufacturing industry has witnessed ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace.
Manufacturing, materials engineering, and development are at the very core of these next generation electronics insertion strategies outlined in road maps for development of next generation products. Future electronic systems can be more intelligent, have higher density, use less power, operate at higher speed, and can include mixed technology devices and assembly structures at lower cost than today.
There have been many approaches to addressing the advanced manufacturing requirements of microprocessors and portable electronics with successive generations of semiconductors. Many industry road maps have identified significant gaps between the current semiconductor capability and the available supporting electronic manufacturing technologies. The limitations and issues with current technologies include increasing clock rates, electromagnetic interference, thermal loads, second level assembly reliability stresses and cost.
As these manufacturing systems evolve to incorporate more components with varied environmental needs, the pressure to push the technological envelope becomes increasingly challenging. More significantly, with the ever-increasing complexity, the potential risk of error increases greatly during manufacture.
In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Thus, a need remains for smaller footprints and more robust methods for manufacture. Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.